Jo Cox was brutally shot and stabbed by Thomas Mair outside her constituency surgery in June

But families on the run-down Birstall estate where Thomas Mair lived alone for years after the death of his grandparents regarded him as harmless - perhaps even vulnerable.

They playfully nicknamed him Marigold for his love of gardening in the brightly coloured rubber gloves and told how he taught disabled kids and volunteered.

He studied at a local college as a mature student, regularly delivered his mum's food shopping and spent the day there before the murder tuning her telly.

Mair had completely withdrawn from society, only speaking to grunt “computer” at library staff, where he masterminded his evil plot and fed himself a diet of far-right hate.

Not even his closest relatives - his mum or two brothers - knew of his twisted Neo-Nazi views or his online ties to networks of white supremacists.

But when police searched his "sparsely furnished" home on the day of Mrs Cox's murder on June 16, they were met with a hoard of Nazi memorabilia, including a bookcase featuring a Third Reich golden eagle with a swastika on top.

On April 6, he looked at the American neo-Nazi news site Daily Stormer before searching for Dylann Roof, who was suspected of killing nine black Americans in Charleston in 2015.

He also searched for the Ku Klux Klan, former BNP leaders, and matricide.

The judge told the jury Mair's internet search history had been analysed as far back as 2012 and also contained searches for the National Front and the Occidental Observer, which covers politics from a white nationalist perspective.

Mair also searched for the Conservative MP Ian Gow, who was murdered by the IRA, the last MP to be murdered before Mrs Cox.

Jurors were shown a YouTube video that Mair watched on June 7 of an American man shooting a .22 sawn-off shotgun in a field, filmed from a head-cam.

This was the same day he was said to have searched for Mrs Cox on Wikipedia and Google Images.

A black wallet containing Thomas Mair's student ID card was among the items recovered by police

Brendan Cox reacts to Thomas Mair's life sentence for the murder of his wife Jo Cox

Giving evidence by videolink from Leeds Crown Court, the mother said she had seen Mair on the morning of Mrs Cox's murder.

"He had a pair of dark trousers on, a dark khaki jacket and a cream baseball cap," she said, adding that he was carrying three or four bags.

"He always carried bags."

Witnesses said Mair screamed, "Britain first. This is for Britain. Britain will always come first", as he shot the MP three times, including twice in the head, and stabbed her 15 times with a dagger, just a week before the EU referendum.